Contentions

On Friday, in speaking about the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the president said this:

You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn’t.

I understand that there are legal and financial issues involved, and a full investigation will tell us exactly what happened. But it is pretty clear that the system failed, and it failed badly. And for that, there is enough responsibility to go around. And all parties should be willing to accept it.

That includes, by the way, the federal government. For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot and will not happen anymore. To borrow an old phrase, we will trust but we will verify.

Now isn’t that rich? Here we have the most compulsive finger-pointing, blame-shifting, I’m-not-responsible-for-anything-that’s-happening-on-my-watch president imaginable lecturing others about finger-pointing. He’s like an alcoholic who sermonizes to his college-age son for drinking a Bud Light. The man who seemingly cannot go more than five minutes without blaming someone, somewhere, for the problems he faces is now insisting on personal accountability from others.

It gets better, though. Mr. Obama, in saying that the federal government has some responsibility for what went wrong, reverts to his habit by blaming — you guessed it — the prior administration while praising his own. This was too much even for Chip Reid of CBS News, who points out:

“A decade or more” clearly encompasses the Bush Administration, and may include the Clinton years too. But Mr. Obama’s been president for nearly 16 months. Does he get at least a little piece of the blame? Not a bit, he made clear. He portrayed his administration as valiantly fighting the good fight against the oil companies from day one.

Ah, yes, how fortunate we all are to have on our side Barack the Valiant, intrepid fighter of all things evil, at once omnicompetent and all-wise, forever put upon because he must clean up the mistakes of others.

It is all rather childish, this delusional game our president plays. Mr. Obama’s manifest public failures are increasingly having to make room for his private ones. He is a whiner and a crybaby. And he should, for his own sake, cease and desist.